Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Gods & Kings Review

Ostensibly, the “faith” meter in Gods and Kings is just like the
“culture” meter in that it is another meter that you watch fill up
before showering your civilization with goodies that mainly affect the domestic economy and accumulation of gold, culture, and happiness.

What
it does though is enable synergies and an exponential amount of
strategies. It also greatly affects the entire playthrough of the game.
For
instance, let’s say that you want to grab land quickly and so choose
the liberty tree with its free settler. The weakness of this is that you
end up short on food and culture and happiness. Well, you can choose
traits that enhance the food, culture, and happiness, and so alieviate
this shortcoming.

Or, you want a small traditional kingdom. They
do okay in the short term, but mid-game a lack of territory will see you
falling behind. But if you choose a religion that gives you gold for
every foreign city that converts to your religion, then you can have
your little kingdom while conquering the world with your religion and
becoming rich in the process.

Or you can go the secular route.
The new faith additions require lots of buildings and you can eschew
this for an advantage over your opponents.

There are many more
combinations that are possible. It effectively makes for many different
paths of victory to try out. The original game, I felt, had only a few
paths to victory, and so this is a big improvement.

There are
other gameplay enhancements. Hit points are now 100. This is important
because previously, all attacks did a minimum of 1/10 damage. So you
could take down a powerful tank with 10 attacks from piddling archers.
Ships are divided between melee and range. This makes a navy worthwhile.
Previous civ games saw me making zero ships, since land units were the
only ones that really mattered since Civ is all about cities.

Now, ships can capture cities. They can capture other ships.

This
alone makes civilizations like England viable, unlike the original
game. England receives a +2 movement bonus for ships. Since ships were
nearly useless in the original game, and at best were geographically
limited artillery units, England’s +2 movement was a waste. But now,
England can threaten any coastal city in the world.

AND,
simultaneously, this makes the commerce culture tree much more useful
since commerce has a handy little talent that gives you +3 production in
coastal cities.

There have been some tweaks to the tech tree and
new civilizations too. They seem interesting and I’ve yet to figure
them all out.

All in all, if you are a civilization V player,
this is an essential purchase. It makes the game much much better, for
what it is.